


Radioactive (7 Days)

by princessofmind



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Apocalypse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-18
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-14 12:08:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessofmind/pseuds/princessofmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think it would be eathier if there were zombieth."</p><p>There's truth to the statement.  Zombies are easy.  Plagues of the undead can be combatted, smacked down, overpowered.  You have the strength now, the speed, to just put him on your back and run for days, outwitting whatever monstrous creations roam the world in this new era.  But a vacated world is scary, when everything that happened is the fault of humans, all the death and horror could have been avoided and fall in a heap at the feet of the men who wanted to play at nuclear war.  The dark, stretching for miles above their heads and under their feet, is far more terrifying than anything their minds can conjure up, and that's the worst of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Radioactive (7 Days)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InkSkratches](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSkratches/gifts).



> This actually started out as what was supposed to be a three sentence prompt on tumblr, but obviously this got WAY away from me. Like, WAY away from me. There are some mental images that just get so fixated in your brain that you have to expand upon them, and this was one of them. This is very much an exercise in writing stream of consciousness, so it hasn't been edited. Please forgive any mistakes and the like. Also, thanks to Ink for prompting me this, and this work is dedicated to her. I hope you all enjoy!

**Day 103 ******

The metal groans under your weight as you scale the ladder, but you've been up here hundreds of times before and everything is still amazingly structurally sound, so you highly doubt that it's going to just collapse now no matter how much it protests. You haul yourself through the grate and in to the control room, ducking under a coil of wires thicker than your forearm to get to the screens against the far wall and the chair facing them. The flickering glow casts the room in a sickly green light, and there are no words in your vocabulary for how sick you are of artificial green and pale yellow being the only shades you can see. You slump against the back of the chair, pushing it hard against the console as you lean your chin against the threadbare faux leather, breathing in the stale but familiar scent.

Sollux is sitting with his bare feet tucked under his legs, chewing his lips while he scratches at the hair starting to grow back on his skull. The wiry black strands poking their way through his still slightly raw skin fills you with a kind of hope you've been edging away from, because even though he's been alive this long, it's a slow killer, and you've seen people succumb to it with no warning. But his skin is healing, although still blistered and sore on his arms and the back of his neck, but they've finally started to heal, and you liken the growth of hair to the growth of grass on a barren plain. It's depressing as hell to look at, events still too fresh in your memory for you to be genuinely glad, but it makes you smile all the same.

You grab his hand and pin it under your chin against the leather, and although it leaves his arm bent back at an odd angle, he doesn't complain. Instead, his attention is fully on the gauges and bars flickering colors and numbers at odd intervals. Some of them you recognize. Apparently it's a balmy 77 degrees outside, and the precipitation levels are low. You can't remember what month it is, but it has to feel nicer out there than it does in this stuffy hell hole. Most of the gauges mean nothing to you, but it obviously means something to him; he wouldn't have called you up just for the temperature.

"They've never shown numbers before," you say, words coming out a bit garbled from the odd angle of your neck. "It's about time you got the damn thing fixed."

He scoffs, pushing the grimy Wal-Mart brand reader's glasses up on his nose. "We're kind of at a theriouth dithadvantage, tho I'm thurprithed that we got it fixed at all."

Ever since he was well enough to sit up in the computer chair, you've been carrying him up to the control room, pushing the chair around and following his instructions to the letter despite how many times you nearly electrocute yourself. As soon as he's able to scoot around on the floor himself, he kicks you out, saying that you're absolutely hopeless when it comes to electronics and your talents could be used better elsewhere. Elsewhere being cataloguing supplies in the pantry and working out how many hours the generator can afford them on the control panel before sputtering out. There are too many nights where the two of you sit in the pitch blackness of the control room, backs pressed against the wall and clutching at each other's hands, too terrified of the soul-crushing darkness to make their way back to the sleeping quarters.

"That'th the important one," he says, a skinny finger gesturing to a number next to a gauge that is very low and colored green. The number reads .03 GY, and although you never even finished middle school, necessity has taught you the readings and your heart lurches so hard you feel dizzy. He tries to scratch at the back of his head again while you're distracted, but you pin that hand as well and he grumbles disingenuously.

"That's a safe number," you say slowly, and he doesn't even mock your statement of the obvious. You can hear the breath rustling in his lungs, and you kiss the inside of his wrist as you stare blankly at the screen. He nods, the bruises under his eyes black like a raccoon in the sporadic light as he slips his glasses off and sets them down gingerly on the keyboard.

"We should turn off the generator, don't wanna puth it too hard, ethpethially now," he mutters, and you don't bother to acknowledge him as you loop his arms around your neck and start the trek back to the sleeping quarters.

**Day 104**

There's no danger of running out of food. The bunker was a project funded by the army, a headquarters built far enough underground and safe enough to protect the protectors during the war should things take a turn for the worse. They did, of course, but by that point everything had gone to shit so badly that there wasn't anyone important left to save. You'd read about the bunkers on newspaper scraps you caught in the wind as you wandered from town to town, but you didn't exactly count on literally stumbling in to one when the bomb dropped. It was made to hold a lot more than two teenage boys, and even at their hungriest, there's no foreseeable end to the canned goods and dried meal packets that were interesting the first time but now just taste like sand.

You ration out the canned fruit, because as much as you'd love to dive head-first in to a can of peaches, it's the only thing Sollux can stomach. The smell of canned beans or various unappetizing meats makes him scrabble for the sink and heave until he's practically unconscious, so you always feed him first and eat while he's in the shower. You're sucking on a cube of sugar as you check the generator, that tight coil of anxiety twisting furiously as you try to avoid burning your fingertips and examine the connectors. He's still in bed, was up half the night holding you down and rocking you back to sleep, but the news from yesterday has left you jittery and filled with a nervous energy that you need to dissipate.

The piping in the showers is strong enough to support your body weight, so you do pull ups and chin ups until your hands slip on the metal from sweat, and the long corridors are good for mindlessly jogging back and forth, breath puffing out of you as the sweat trickles down your back under your shirt. You were emaciated before the war started, spent most of your life homeless and living out of garbage cans and were too hungry to be strong. But Sollux can barely walk from the kitchen to the bedroom, is too weak from the poisoning to defend himself, so you work until your knees tremble with exhaustion and you spend most of your days in an exhausted haze despite never knowing whether or not you'll ever make it out of the bunker. It gives you something to do, keeps you sane, so you don't allow yourself to question it.

"I'm not gonna work on it today," he says from the doorway, examining his fingernails instead of watching you work. You shove at your own glasses (actual prescription ones) and stand, making your way over to the cabinet that houses the flashlights and batteries. You pull one out and toss it to him, switching off the generator and following the shadow of his figure back down to the bedroom. Your bed is made up of several cots pushed together and tied in place with rope, blankets piled in to an untidy nest with half a dozen of the thinnest pillows you've ever seen in your life. He sits down hard, the frame rattling, and rubs at his eyes. You take the flashlight from his cold fingers, tugging him down in to the blankets with you to attempt to ward off the chill that clings to him like a ghost.

**Day 105**

Sollux came from one of the larger cities. His father owned a software company, and Sollux had already graduated from high school and gotten half way through college before the raids started. He's the smartest person you've ever met, and despite how addled the poisoning makes him sometimes, he's startling coherent, an endless well of information that keeps you anchored in the darkness threatening to eat both of you alive. His father got shot while they were trying to escape the city, and they didn't make it much further before they took his mother as well. He had two little sisters, twins, with big black curly pigtails and the same blue eyes as him. He'd watched their skin flake off and their hair come out by the handful while they choked and vomited and screamed. He buried them within days of each other, and only got one town over before nearly succumbing to the poison himself, and that was where you found him.

The blast had been close, so close that the convenience store you'd been raiding shook and the windows shattered. You could hear the geiger counters screaming before the people could, and you ran as hard and as fast as you could towards the little portal in the ground you'd walked past earlier. You tripped over him, and you've never been the benevolent sort, but the sight of him, skin red and raw with tear tracks still fresh in the dirt on his face, made something inside you _hurt_ so you pulled him in after you and sealed the door behind you.

You didn't think he would live. You didn't know what to do with his body, how you were going to survive down in this pit by yourself. But he fought, and although you spent more nights with him in the bathroom than you did in the bed, you never once resented him or viewed him as weak for it. Not only is he the smartest person you know, but he's also the strongest; far stronger than you. He frowns a lot, mutters obscenities under his breath while he sorts wires, but when you tuck him under your chin at night or recite poetry you remember from bathroom stalls he smiles. That takes more strength than you think you've ever possessed in your whole life.

It's been two days since the meters started working, but you've not even walked past the long, inclined walkway that leads up to the portal. You've not packed bags, sorted out supplies, or talked about what things may be like now. Instead you've spent most of your days in bed, not talking, just curled tightly around each other and breathing the same air in the pitch darkness. It's cold, freezing, and you know it's just the nerves but your teeth are chattering so hard you think they're going to shatter. His fingers are tight in your hair, as if you'd even think about moving, and the fear of the unknown, of actually having to confront it, leaves you both completely paralyzed.

**Day 107**

"I think it would be eathier if there were zombieth."

He can feel your smile against his neck, and you know he has to be grinning in response, unabashed and toothy and beautiful. There's truth to the statement. Zombies are easy. Plagues of the undead can be combatted, smacked down, overpowered. You have the strength now, the speed, to just put him on your back and run for days, outwitting whatever monstrous creations roam the world in this new era. But a vacated world is scary, when everything that happened is the fault of humans, all the death and horror could have been avoided and falls in a heap at the feet of the men who wanted to play at nuclear war. The dark, stretching for miles above your head and under your feet, is far more terrifying than anything your mind can conjure up, and that's the worst of all.

The radio was the first thing you fixed, and even now, when he can't sleep, you know he stumbles up the ladder to sit flicking through the channels, his eyes vacant and haunted as he's greeted by nothing but silence. It's impossible for you two to be the only ones left, he says, but it's so hollow and lacking in confidence that you can't bear to tease him about it. That's where he was last night while you were looking at the army green duffels sitting innocently in the kitchen, a large one for you and a small one he can wear over his back.

"We can pretend there's zombies," you say, running your fingers over the stubble on his head, tickling behind one of his ears to make him squirm. "You can be the brilliant strategist and I can be the brainless brawn. There's even a shotgun down here, I can speak hillbilly and everything."

There's a tint of nerves in his laughter, and his fingers squeeze the fabric of your shirt, but it's genuine, you've learned to hear his emotions since more often than not you're completely blind. "I think it would help," he whispers back, and although the idea makes you want to cry and scream, you squeeze him until you know he can't breathe but he never complains.

**Day 108**

"I with we could take the canth."

You sigh and put another box of dried food packets in the duffel, shuffling around the batteries and first-aid kit already in place. "Look, I may be more built than I ever had a desire to be, but I still got limits. Too many of those would break my spine, and there ain't no way you're gonna be carrying them."

He offers you the can of pears and you obligingly take one, the syrup thick on your fingers and even thicker in your mouth. He grabs your wrist before you can wipe yourself clean on your pants, drawing the digits in to his mouth and hollowing his cheeks, his tongue rough as it slides through the sticky substance between your fingers and the top of your palm. His mouths parts with a wet pop, eyebrows raised as you stare rather openly at him.

"Fuck," you grumble, shoving him (gently, always gently) towards the pantry. "Just a couple, you demon."

**Day 109**

He's thin, too thin, under your fingertips, but you don't know what it would be like to not count every one of his ribs, to feel the curve of his hips so clearly or to be able to latch on to his collarbone until he screams. He's taller than you, not by much, and normally you can't notice when he's curled against your chest as you carry him to bed. But when he's stretched out, toes curling and fingers clutching at the pillows over his head, it's obvious that he's got several inches on you. His skin is like a topographical map, a mix of smooth milkiness and rough scabs and healing welts. (He'd cried the first time you touched him, yelling furiously that he knows damn well what he looks like and he doesn't need a goddamn pity fuck.)

You stay close to him, touching him everywhere, able to take in the sight of him arching under your hands with the generator running. He makes love the same way he does everything else, with complete and utter abandon, intense focus and unnerving dexterity. Tonight he's sick with nerves, and this is as much a distraction for the two of you as it is an act of love. You drag it out, have him alternating between curses and pleas, so he's howling when he finally comes, falling asleep before you can get back from the bathroom with a damp washcloth.

He's curled in to the warm spot left by your body, unhidden by the blankets tossed at his feet. He's almost ghostly in the artificial light, and while the prospect of seeing him against the blue of the sky and the rays of the run makes your heart flutter, the unseen and unknown makes the rest of you rebel desperately. You wipe him clean and cover him with the blankets, stroking his arm and studying the way his eyelashes cast a shadow over his cheekbones as you cry and cry and cry.

**Day 110**

He insisted on walking up to the portal on his own, carrying his own bag. He's not sagging with exhaustion by the time you get there, and you're absolutely entitled to the swell of pride you feel at that. He holds your hand the whole time, no sound echoing in the metal chamber beside your boots and the swish of his too-big pants. He doesn't remember coming through here, and never came to investigate. He's eyeing the air lock wearily, and his skin is clammy against yours, fingers white-knuckled against the strap of his duffle.

He can't survive another bout of poisoning. You can't survive without him.

This whole time you've kept a stiff upper lip, packing and making sure he slept before you, and clearly it was all in vain, because he tips your chin up to look at him, takes in the redness of your eyes and the nervous twitch of your lips. He presses your foreheads together, glasses clicking and pressing against your face uncomfortably, but his eyes are huge and full of so much hope that you feel your heart moving up to meet it.

"We'll be okay," he breathes against your lips, and you find yourself smiling, his arms around your waist and upturned mouth pressed against your shoulder as you force the creaking bolts open and the two of you walk out in to the sun.


End file.
